Court To Rule On Motion To Gag Barrett Brown

[better-dead-than-fed]

http://freebarrettbrown.org/hearing-gag-order/

Brown is facing 100 years for no good reason. He is an investigative journalist who has done good work:


Patent application title: Persona management system for communications (http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090313274)



our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that ... believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice....

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585

Persona Management (http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Management)


... intelligence contractors and the intelligence community that have interests in the online world.... serious things are happening... in terms of how governments use the internet to pursue interests that aren’t in the best interests of liberty.

There’s incredible potential from their standpoint, to take control of the conversation, to monitor, and to manipulate, the information flow which is frankly important both for democracy and for dictatorships. And what we’ve seen, just from the HBGary emails and others here and there, is that there’s a very endemic problem that’s going on that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. And it’s not being addressed by Congress.

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/we-spoke-to-barrett-brown-from-prison

The DOJ has requested the court to gag Brown from speaking any further to the media, including bloggers.

[presence]

Truly Orwellian

[better-dead-than-fed]

..

[better-dead-than-fed]

Court gags Brown from saying anything "that could interfere with a fair trial or otherwise [undermine the Government's case against him]....";

but specifies Brown may still publish "topics not related to the counts on which he stands indicted".

http://douglaslucas.com/BBLOL_AgreedOrder_Media.pdf

[dillo]

how are gag orders not a violation of the 1st amendment

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

i thought gag orders were supposed to be for jury members so no info leaks out of court. Not to make the accused STFU

[better-dead-than-fed]

how are gag orders not a violation of the 1st amendment

The judge here cites no legal authority justifying the gag, so the gag presumably does violate the 1st Amendment. The only argument I can imagine the judge making is that Brown's speech could bias potential jurors, and that could conflict with the court's job under Article 3 of the constitution. That argument would be pernicious, as it could be used to justify the government arresting anyone for any reason, with or without probable cause, and then gagging him. Even the prisoners in Guantanamo have not been gagged, as far as I know. In Brown's case, the government will proceed to put on a pretend "trial" for show, and we will have no way of knowing what is happening behind the scenes.

This gag violates not only Brown's rights, but also the public's 1st-Amendment right to hear what prisoners want to say. More about that on page 2 of this: Argument re Media-Contact (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJPUnusJPPuiy2n27wNLqhjtzcWpEexMdFAkF3Zdp9o/edit). When I filed that document, the court kept it off the public record. When I asked the court to unseal it, Motion Against Illegal Secrecy (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5ZYXb_HdIQhdFRJUXpFYUtUaDg/edit?usp=sharing), the court refused (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5ZYXb_HdIQhY3JZVmlXRmtoeWM/edit?usp=sharing). When I asked the appeals court to uphold my right to public proceedings, they refused (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JFSkPJzDmRZSJSXRsSCuu7C6ArR-5sOCgbziZKA5ZR0/pub). When I reported the appeals court's actions on reddit, the admin there banned (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?424601-Interesting-Reddit-Feature&p=5183376&viewfull=1#post5183376) me for no legitimate reason. When I raised the question of how many tax-dollars are being used to manipulate reddit content, I got bullied and told (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?424601-Interesting-Reddit-Feature&p=5211599&viewfull=1#post5211599) to "forget" about that question.

[better-dead-than-fed]

I just realized that Brown's lawyers consented to the gag order. Whether Brown himself consented is a different question, and now we have no way of finding out.

[better-dead-than-fed]

Here are twenty of the sort of articles the DOJ does not want people reading about Brown's case; the list was compiled by the DOJ:

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/barrett-brown-fbi-summer-reading-list/

[better-dead-than-fed]

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/03/06/exclusive-inside-lulzsec-mastermind-turns-on-his-minions/


Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu,”... [after Aug. 15, 2011] worked almost daily out of FBI offices, helping the feds....

Here's Sabu in action:

143060921059778560

heard it through: https://twitter.com/ronbryn/status/378947425450225665

[Peace Piper]

Greenwald on Brown:

The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it
Glenn Greenwald 21 March 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymous

The journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism


Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

"I think it's important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases. . . . What's unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That's not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don't just complain about the Swartz case. Don't just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country - mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring."



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvl0pWKaZ14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvl0pWKaZ14
Jailed Reporter Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms 1/2

Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer to 3 1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T's security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate's Justin Peters wrote: "it's not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime", while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: "he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way 'broke into' AT&T's customer database - something company representatives confirmed during testimony." But he had a long record of disruptive and sometimes even quite ugly (though legal) online antagonism, so he had to be severely punished with years in prison. Also this week, the DOJ indicted the deputy social media editor at Reuters, Matthew Keys, on three felony counts which carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for allegedly providing some user names and passwords that allowed Anonymous unauthorized access into the computer system of the Los Angeles Times, where they altered a few stories and caused very minimal damage. As Peters wrote about that case, "the charges under the CFAA seem outrageously severe" and, about Keys' federal prosecutors, observed: "apparently, they didn't take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case."

But the pending federal prosecution of 31-year-old Barrett Brown poses all new troubling risks. That's because Brown - who has been imprisoned since September on a 17-count indictment that could result in many years in prison - is a serious journalist who has spent the last several years doggedly investigating the shadowy and highly secretive underworld of private intelligence and defense contractors, who work hand-in-hand with the agencies of the Surveillance and National Security State in all sorts of ways that remain completely unknown to the public...MORE>
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymous